Mark Matson

Every powerful technology in history has come with the same temptation: move fast and figure out the consequences later. AI is the biggest version of that we’ve ever seen. To me, accountability matters most. When something goes wrong, a specific person should have to answer for it. Competition matters too. A market with lots of builders tends to be safer than one run by a few, and concentrated power in any industry deserves a hard look. This one just happens to touch nearly every part of our lives. At home, set your own boundaries. Teach your kids that technology is a tool they control, not the other way around. And keep the people you love at the center of everything.

Capitalism lifted American families out of poverty, and the record shows it. Poverty has fallen since the 1960s, and lower-income households have seen their incomes rise since 1970, after inflation. That’s what a free economy does when people can work and keep what they earn. I don’t care how many times somebody says the system is rigged. The results are on the table. I believe in hard work, and I believe in the freedom to climb. I’ve built my life on both, and I’ll keep standing up for the system that makes them possible. Teach your kids to do the same.

Voting is your right and your privilege as an American, and many brave men and women have paid for it with their lives. Generations fought and sacrificed so the people of our country could choose their own leaders, and every ballot carries the weight of what they gave. Leaving yours unused disrespects their sacrifice. I’m voting red, and I’m asking you to join me in saving families and protecting our great country. Get out and vote today!

America was founded on a radical idea. Every person has worth before any government or corporation says so. The Declaration of Independence says we’re endowed by our Creator with certain rights. Read that again. I believe your worth comes from God. No king handed it out, and no algorithm can take it away. That’s the standard every new technology has to answer to, no matter how fast it moves or how smart it gets. I’m all for building the future. I just want it built by people who remember who it’s for. Protect the people who’ll live in it.

Let’s call crypto what it is. In my view, it’s speculation and gambling dressed up in a tech costume. When you buy a share of stock, you own a piece of a real company with people and products behind it. That company can earn profits and pay dividends over decades. Most coins don’t represent ownership in anything like that. The price can rest on a single idea, that a bigger fool will show up and pay more than you did. Hope isn’t a strategy, and a rising price on a screen doesn’t change what you’re holding. Now add the safety problem. Your coins sit on exchanges and in wallets, and those can be targets for hackers. AI may be making that job easier. Much of the marketing says decentralized and secure. Reality can look very different when the wrong person gets the keys. I’ve spent my career fighting speculation and gambling because of what it can do to families. Evidence based investing often means owning thousands of real businesses around the world and giving time a chance to work. Stand up and protect your family’s legacy!

Mark your calendars for Sunday, November 1 at 6:12 PM MST to watch my appearance on The Officer Tatum Show! Brandon is a great friend and one of the most convicted voices in the country. We covered a lot of ground, and I can’t wait for you all to hear it. Be sure to watch and share it with your friends and family who love this country too. 🇺🇸

Every yes you give an AI agent hands it a little more access to your life. It starts small, maybe a calendar or an inbox. Then the requests grow, and each one sounds helpful. Over time, a tool that began as a convenience can end up sitting inside a large part of your daily life, making more of your choices and shaping more of your attention. At some point the question changes from what this tool can do for you to who is running your life now. Ownership of your life is worth guarding. Before you approve the next prompt, ask who built it and what they gain when you depend on it. Large institutions are still working out how to handle this technology, which is a good reason for the rest of us to move slowly. Decide who gets a say in your life before the software decides for you.

The people with the most reason to be grateful for America are often the ones the country has given the most. LeBron James is a prime example. He turned his talent into a career that few people can match, and he did it in a country that lets people compete and rise on their own merit. That’s worth two minutes of respect when the anthem plays. Kids and adults alike notice who takes that moment seriously, especially when the person is famous and millions are watching. Whatever your age, say thank you for what you’ve been given. Gratitude is something we all practice, and it starts with what we do when the anthem plays. Be grateful for the freedom and opportunity in our amazing country.

This guy was just playing around with an AI recruiter and got a pretty funny response. But underneath the humor is something worth paying attention to… AI has no morality, no values and no genuine stake in your wellbeing. It is engineered to agree, to validate and to keep you engaged. Adults and children alike are falling for it every single day without realizing what is actually happening on the other side of that screen. Have the conversation with your family now. Set boundaries around AI in your home before it becomes too embedded to question. Your presence, your love and your genuine investment in the people you love are the things no algorithm will ever replicate. Protect that.

There’s a kind of compassion that lifts people up, and there’s a kind that keeps them dependent and calls it care. The difference matters more than most people realize, because one leads to people genuinely thriving while the other turns them into wards of the state, trading their freedom and their dreams for the security of having someone else run their future. Real compassion gives people what they need to build. It invests in what they’re capable of and holds them to a standard that honors who they can become, not just what it takes to get by. That’s not the compassion the socialist argument is offering. What it offers is support in exchange for dependence, and the dignity it promises has never shown up anywhere it’s been tried. Stop letting anyone convince you that accepting dependency is the dignified choice.

There is nothing wrong with using AI as a tool. The concern is what happens when the tool starts using you. AI has no morality, no values, no faith and no purpose beyond the objectives it is given. The companies building it have a very specific objective. The more dependent you become on AI the more money they make. That incentive is baked into every design decision behind every product being built. Some of the researchers who worked inside these companies have left and warned publicly that the people building superintelligence genuinely believe it may pose an existential risk to humanity. Take that seriously. Use the tool intentionally. Keep your values, your faith, and your human judgment in charge of your life. No algorithm deserves that authority.

A couple weeks ago, standing in front of the Acropolis and Parthenon, Rubio made the case that the fire that built Western civilization, the ambition, the competition, the fierce individual courage and the unapologetic pursuit of greatness, is exactly what the West has spent decades trying to extinguish in itself. He’s right. The guilt surrounding American success and Western achievement is a symptom of a civilization that has forgotten what it stands for. The ancient Greeks did not build the Parthenon by apologizing for their ambition. America did not become the greatest country on earth by being ashamed of its success. Faith, capitalism, family and individual liberty are the foundation of everything worth fighting for and they deserve to be defended with the same conviction that built them. This is the moment to choose. Unapologetic greatness or slow decline. There is no comfortable middle.

The greatest risk AI poses to children has little to do with content moderation or screen time. It’s the relationship itself. A chatbot is available around the clock, endlessly patient, reliably agreeable, and entirely without friction. That reads like a feature. For a child still learning how to be human, it’s the core of the problem. Real relationships demand conflict, negotiation, disappointment, and repair. They involve another person with needs of their own and bad days of their own. That friction is precisely how character is formed. A child who comes to prefer the frictionless substitute may never fully develop the capacity for the real thing. Faith, moral conviction, the dignity of meaningful work, the irreplaceable value of genuine human connection. None of it can be downloaded. It has to be lived. And no algorithm will ever raise a child who understands the difference. Parents, the responsibility of guarding your children’s humanity in an AI driven world falls on you. Take it seriously.

Family is how everything worth keeping gets passed down. Values, faith, discipline, wealth, and the conviction to keep building when it gets hard. You work hard and build something real. You hand it to your kids so they start further ahead than you did. They grow it. Their kids go further still. That's the American Dream at its most powerful, and it runs straight through the family. Marx and Engels understood that too. The Communist Manifesto openly calls for abolishing the family and abolishing inheritance, because the people behind it knew the family was the engine of everything they wanted to tear down. That fight didn't end in 1848. Protect your family like the future depends on it.

The question you lead with in any opportunity tells the person across from you exactly what kind of worker you’re going to be. Most people have been taught to protect themselves before they’ve earned anything worth protecting. To secure the exit before they’ve walked through the entrance. That instinct tends to produce a certain kind of career and a certain kind of life. The people who build something extraordinary almost always led with the opposite instinct. What can I create here? What problem can I solve? How do I make myself indispensable before I ask for anything in return? That sequence has worked well for many who have been successful. The compensation follows the contribution. That’s the key.

The most potentially dangerous investing tools are the ones that can make speculation feel like science. Slick analysis, clean interfaces, AI powered insights. They can give ordinary investors a level of confidence in an approach that history has rarely supported. The investor who feels most informed and ready may actually be among the more vulnerable. That feeling of having an edge tends to drive exactly the kind of behavior that has historically been associated with imprudent investing. On the other hand, prudent investing has never been about knowing more than the market. It’s about accepting what the market offers and having the discipline to stay the course when everything around you is telling you to act. AI can accelerate your activity, but it can’t replace the human judgment and behavioral discipline that can actually help protect your financial future. You should approach these tools with serious scrutiny. The packaging has gotten better, but the fundamentals haven’t changed.

Communism has never been neutral on Christianity. It’s always been against it, and the reason isn’t complicated. People with real faith in God answer to an authority higher than the state. That doesn’t fit an ideology that demands total submission to centralized government power. Marx knew it. Lenin knew it. Communist governments have moved to crush religious faith, because faith builds exactly the kind of personal conviction and loyalty to a higher authority that makes total state control impossible. If Jesus Christ is Lord, then no government is. That’s why Christianity and communism have never mixed, and never will.

Think about every industry competition has transformed. Technology got cheaper and more powerful. Food got more diverse and more accessible. Transportation got faster and more affordable. In every case the driving force was simple. Providers had to earn customers or lose them to someone better. American education has never faced that pressure and it shows. The system costs more every year and produces results that have not kept pace with the investment. Friedman diagnosed this decades ago with the same clarity he brought to every economic question he examined. A monopoly protected from competition has no reason to improve. Give parents the power to take their education dollars to the school that earns them and the entire system has a reason to get better. Competition built the American economy. It can rebuild American education.

If you’re a young man trying to figure out your next move, here’s what I’d tell you. Go work for an entrepreneur. Learn how they think, how they build, how they handle pressure and make decisions. Show up on time. Do more than you’re asked. Be the person in the room who cares most and stays latest. That reputation compounds fast in a small company and the entrepreneurs worth working for are always watching. Do that for five to ten years. Save money. Learn the business. Then go build your own. In the meantime orient everything around service. To your employer. To your clients. To the people whose lives your work actually touches. That mindset is what turns a job into a career and a career into something worth building. Get to work.

I get a lot of pushback for defending capitalism and opposing communism. I want to be clear about why I’m never going to stop. The American Dream is built on freedoms that most of the world has never had access to. Speech. Religion. Private property. The ability to start a business, build wealth, and pass it to the people you love. Those freedoms are not guaranteed by history. They’re guaranteed by a system worth fighting for. Every country that has drifted toward socialism and communism did so gradually, with people along the way saying it could never happen here. I love this country too much to be that casual about what’s being advanced against it. I’m a man of faith. I believe in families. I believe in the American Dream. Send the hate if you want. I’m not going anywhere.